Faculty & Staff

Julie Haizlip

Julie is one of the physician faculty members of the Center for Appreciative Practice. She believes the time she spends working with groups throughout the Health System provides a nice balance for her clinical work in Pediatric Critical Care. She is fascinated by the culture of academic medicine and how interpersonal relationships impact the work environment. Julie is married to her high school sweetheart. They have three fantastic kids and two dogs. If you need to find her between October and April, look for the nearest ice hockey game. (Go ‘Canes!)

Rebecca Harmon

Rebecca Bouterie Harmon, PhD, RN, PMH CNS, BC, has been a psychiatric mental health nurse since 1984 and joined the faculty of UVA School of Nursing in 1993. She chaired the team that brought Appreciative Inquiry to the School of Nursing strategic planning process. When not teaching, she practices the cha-cha, plants a flower garden, and searches for the perfect cookie recipe.

Natalie May

Natalie has enthusiastically served as one of the Center for Appreciative Practice faculty since its inception. A breast cancer survivor, she especially enjoys teaching and speaking about ways appreciative practices can be integrated into our daily lives. “The AI Project has afforded me many life-changing opportunities, but the greatest of these is the chance to help others try new ways of approaching difficult challenges — illness, parenting, and social issues. It has truly been a joy and a privilege.” Natalie lives in Richmond with her husband and their teenage daughter.

Peggy Plews-Ogan

Peggy has led the Appreciative Inquiry process at UVA since its inception. She is a practicing internist and teaches in both the undergraduate and the graduate medical school curriculum. She is principal investigator of the Wisdom in Medicine Project, a grant funded by the Templeton Foundation to study how people grow through adversity. This project resulted in the book Choosing Wisdom: Strategies and Inspiration for Growing Through Life-Changing Difficulties (available on Amazon). She has also done extensive work and teaching in patient safety and leadership. Her leadership work resulted in her most recent edited volume Wisdom Leadership: Leading Positive Change in the Academic Health Science Center (Radcliffe Press). Peggy lives with her pediatrician husband Jim; they have two children. All four love to run.

John Schorling

John has been at UVA for a long time, having come here as a resident in 1980. He did leave for a while, but couldn’t stay away and came back in 1988 to join the faculty in General Medicine. While gone, he and his wife lived in Brazil for a year (where their son was born), working with Dick Guerrant, and they also took a year and traveled around the world. In 2001, John started the Physician Wellness Program and got to travel around the world again with his wife and two kids, studying programs in other countries. Like Julie Haizlip, he married his high school sweetheart (they actually met in middle school). He is director of the UVA Mindfulness Center and also teaches in the Healers Art program. “There are a lot of common threads in this work (Wellness, Healers Art, Mindfulness, AI) that make life very interesting right now.”

Cyndi Smith-Power

Cyndi has served as a Division Administrator within the Department of Medicine for the past eight years and carries out her work in finance and administration with an infectious enthusiasm and professional perspective that is grounded in reality. Her unfailing good humor is matched only by her need for order and, in her spare time, she enjoys alphabetizing the canned goods in her cupboard and ensuring her wardrobe is appropriately sorted by primary, secondary and complementary colors. She is mother to a boisterously delightful Sun Conure and prissy Lutino Cockatiel. Cyndi has completed coursework to serve as a trained AI facilitator and looks forward to her future involvement within the AI community.

Anita Thompson-Heisterman

Anita Thompson-Heisterman, MSN, FNP, PMHCNS-BC, PMHNP-BC, is an Assistant Professor in the Family, Community, and Mental Health Systems Department at the University of Virginia School of Nursing and a nurse practitioner with the Department of Neurology in the Memory and Aging Care Clinic. A passionate advocate for the power of AI as a modality to bring people together in shared common purpose for positive change, in 2012 she led an interdisciplinary team of students from the University of Virginia and the University of Limpopo in a community project in a South African village using AI to elicit strengths and build capacity. Anita is married to a great guy who keeps her smiling, has two daughters who bring her much joy, and a wonderful son-in law who is able to program her i-devices over the phone. She enjoys traveling, reading, watching college basketball, BBC productions, learning how to cook Indian food, walks in natural settings, and Margaritas at the beach. Some day she hopes to put all her photos in scrapbooks and to figure out what to do with all those Beanie Babies.